Names

Book Review

Mary Ann Walter — 2024-06-06

The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture and Identity. By Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Attyah Flower. New York: Clarkson Potter. 2023. Pp. 256 (Hardback). $30.00. ISBN 13: 9780593235294.

Book Review

T.K. Alphey — 2024-06-06

Names and Naming in Beowulf: Studies in Heroic Narrative Tradition. By Philip A. Shaw. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 2020. Pp. 228 (Paperback). £28.99. ISBN 13: 9781350211674.

A Note on the UK Local BMD

Stephen J. Bush — 2024-06-06

Data from the UK Local BMD, a volunteer project to transcribe the birth, marriage and death records of England and Wales, is a rare onomastic resource, being one of the few public datasets to contain full names. However, it has yet to be presented in a form amenable to large-scale analysis. This article processes 25,213,860 birth and 9,887,244 death records—collectively representing 204,427 names across 289 years–into a resource for community use. The data are presented alongside a number of summary statistics and both internal and external validation of its integrity. The data, along with the code used to generate it, are available at http://www.github.com/sjbush/uk_bmd for non-commercial research purposes.

Gender and the Urban Linguistic Landscape

Krzysztof Górny — 2024-06-06

This article examines the issue of gender (im)balance in street and roundabout names in Poland’s three largest cities: Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź. The focus of this research falls within the area of urbanonymy, a field that has recently gained in international popularity. However, so far, Poland has received scant attention in urbanonymy, especially in the context of gender imbalance and feminist geography. As the current statistical analysis shows, Polish urbanonyms derived from male names considerably outnumber those derived from female names in Warsaw, Kraków, and Łódź. This paper provides a detailed data onomastic analysis of each of these cities, broken down by borough.1 This data presentation is preceded by a description of the public debate on urbanonyms and the role of women’s names in public spaces in Poland. This debate is becoming increasingly frequent in Polish media and public discourse; this topicality has resulted in campaigns to have the gender imbalance in Polish eponymous urbanonyms redressed. In Kraków, one in three streets is named after a man, and urbanonyms named after males outnumber those named after females by 12.2:1. In Warsaw and Łódź, 1 in 5 eponymous urbanonyms is named after a man, and those named after a male outnumber those named after a female by 9.4:1 and 7.4:1 respectively. As this research shows, many of the reasons for this disproportion are to be found in the histories and contemporary socio-political profiles of Poland’s individual regions.

What's in a Name

Emma Otta — 2024-06-06

The current paper investigates the intra-pair similarity of twins’ first names in comparison to non-twin siblings. The dataset was composed of 2,387 pairs of Brazilian names of same-sex individuals as a function of sex, age (< 18 years vs > 18 years), and self-reported zygosity (MZ: Monozygotic vs DZ: Dizygotic). We assigned scores to each pair of names according to a classification system of 12 categories of intra-pair similarity (0 = absent; and 1 = present). The final score was the sum of the points obtained. ANOVA revealed that MZ twins (95% CI 2.28-2.50) had more similar names than DZ twins (95% CI 2.03-2.26), who, in turn, had more similar names than non-twins (95% CI 1.45-1.87). Females (95% CI 2.38-2.57) generally had more similar names than males (95% CI 1.63-1.83), and siblings over 18 years of age (95% CI 2.34-2.56) were given more similar names than siblings under 18 years of age (95% CI 1.85-2.03). Our results support and extend previous findings providing insight into parental expectations about individuality-relationality that may influence the negotiation of relationship and construction of identity. By naming their twin children, parents emphasize twinness through similar names, whereas they emphasize the individuality of their single-born children through different names.

The Negative Effect of Ambiguous First Names in Online Mate Selection

Kazuya Ogawa — 2024-06-06

Research has shown that some first names can be disadvantageous on the marriage market. However, the precise mechanisms whereby names influence mate selection behaviour remain unknown. This study attempted to address this gap. More specifically, this investigation examined Japanese women’s preferences for male partners with common male names with clear readings as compared to male partners with names with unclear or “ambiguous” readings. This investigation had two guiding hypotheses: (1) Japanese women have a lower preference for ambiguous male names; (2) the lower degree of preference for ambiguous male names was attributable to Japanese women assuming that the names were indicative of a low social class. To test these hypotheses, we conducted a conjoint experiment of 1,261 single Japanese women aged 25 to 34 years in a fictitious online mate selection setting. Participants were provided with fourteen randomly generated profiles of potential marital partners and were asked to decide whether to prefer them or not. It was found that the female participants preferred profiles with common male names over profiles with ambiguous male names in an online mate selection setting, with a significant effect size of 7 percentage points. This finding supported hypothesis 1. However, no evidence was found for hypothesis 2.

Young Chinese Women's Reasons for Changing their Given Names

Yi Liu — 2024-06-06

The implementation of the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China in 2021 greatly facilitated the legal procedure for changing one’s name. The current study collected 334 cases of young Chinese women’s given name changes from January to June 2022 on the Xiaohongshu app, a lifestyle platform that inspires people to discover and connect with a range of diverse lifestyles. After collecting the 334 former and 334 present names of the Chinese women included in this research, the reasons the respondents gave for changing their given names were examined. These reasons included following superstition, correcting registration mistakes, and clarifying gender confusion. The decisions to adopt new names were found to have been motivated by several different reasons. These motivations are explained in detail. As will be shown, the self-renaming practices discovered in this study demonstrate how modern Chinese women can use their personal names to reflect their personal identity. The findings of this study increase our collective understanding of women’s efforts to express their self-awareness through name change.